The “Sunna-minded” Trend 265
To begin with, the concerns that Sivasi expressed in his nasihatname about
the erosion of the boundaries between the non-Muslim and Muslim subjects
of the empire seem to have been shared by a wide circle of political elites from
the mid-seventeenth century onwards. The 1660 fire in Istanbul that burned
down most of the southern shores of the Golden Horn gave the regal matriarch
Hadice Turhan Sultan (r. 1651–83) an excuse to reclaim the Jewish settlements
in the area and complete the unfinished mosque project that Safiye Sultan
(d. 1605) had started half a century earlier.105 The building of the New Mosque
(Yeni Camii) by driving the Jewish residents out of the area initiated another
wave of anti-Jewish and anti-Christian policies that radically transformed the
urban profile of Istanbul in the second half of the seventeenth century.106 The
first preacher of the newly-inaugurated mosque of Hadice Turhan was Vani
Efendi. According to Rycaut, Vani persuaded the grand vizier, Fazıl Ahmed
Pasha, that the fires and the plague that struck the city, as well as the military
failures against Christians, were107
so many parts of Divine Judgments thrown on the Musselmen or
Believers, in vengeance of their too much Licence given to the Christian
Religion, permitting Wine to be sold within the Walls of Constantinople,
which polluted the Imperial City, and ensnared the faithful by tempta-
tion to what was unlawful.Given his aforementioned statements about the Turks’ obligation to conduct
gaza, it seems that Vani saw an obvious connection between conquest or lack
of it in the abode of war and compliance with Sharia in the abode of Islam.108
This view actually predates Vani: when the Venetians captured the islands of
Tenedos (Bozcaada) and Lemnos (Limni) in 1656, the Kadızadelis blamed the
loss of the islands on the fact that grand vizier Boynueğri Mehmed Pasha was
a Sufi.109
During the conquest of Crete, the Ottoman land administrative practices
that Mehmed Birgivi took issue with in the sixteenth century were targeted
by the administration itself.110 In 1669, following the conquest of Kandiye
105 See Thys-Senocak 1998.
106 For anti-Jewish policies in this period see Thys-Senocak 1998 and Baer 2008, 86–96. For
anti-Christian urban policies see Baer 2008, 96–102.
107 Baer 2008, 110.
108 Baer 2008, 172, 173.
109 Baer 2008, 71.
110 The first known land and population survey (tahrir) of the island was undertaken in
1647, although the register has not survived. After Yusuf Pasha conquered Chania, he